This a slow-burn romance told over several chapters but released in three parts a few days apart. There's some suspense, and action and violence will occur later in the story. Of course, since this is Literotica, there are also some spicy scenes along the way! All sexual activity is by experienced adults over the age of 18.
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Prologue
In literature, it always seems to happen on dark and stormy nights.
As a voracious reader, I'd encountered the scenario more times than I could count in books, and in movies and TV shows, it's even worse. There's always thunder and lightning when Scooby and the gang happen upon the haunted house, but those writers basically cribbed it from Frankenstein, Dracula, and such. Most of the time in the movies, it's for dramatic effect, but the intro to one of my favorite TV shows from a few years earlier, "The Incredible Hulk," is a classic example where there's rain, lightning, and really bad things happening that set up the premise of the whole show. In real life, you laugh at hearing of such implausible cases, never dreaming it will ever happen to you.
Until one night when it does....
***
It was a Friday night in November 1987 and I was tired and grumpy. With everyone on the campus of our state's ridiculously large and impersonal land-grant university trying to escape for Thanksgiving break, it took over an hour to get off campus. While sitting there, creeping up one or two car lengths at a time, I eventually came to the conclusion that any department chair that approves class schedules with 4 PM Friday classes obviously doesn't understand university life. He or she should be summarily dismissed.
Or flogged.
Or, better yet, both.
After finally escaping that debacle, the state Department of Transportation and fate left a number of other obstacles in my path to slow me down, but I pressed onward, determined to make it home. I had a whole week off and planned to spend much of it with my dad. He'd had a lot of trouble and heartache over the past two years, with Mom's sickness and passing the previous year chief among them. I looked forward to trying to cheer him up with a deer hunt, a trip to our range in the back woods, a trip to see the new Arnold adventure that had come out a week earlier, and, if he was interested, maybe even talk about getting a new dog. Of course, though I was hesitant to admit it, spending time with him and doing those things might cheer me up, too. Just thinking about it made me smile, despite the delays.
Checking my watch and watching the gas gauge, I decided to pull off the interstate, get gas, and place a collect call to my dad. I was a little over four hours into the trip so I figured I should let him know I was running late to keep him from worrying.
"Collect-call from Mr. Rooney B. Lapely. Will you accept the charges?" asked the operator.
"Sorry, I think Mr. Lately has the wrong number," replied Dad, giving the response meaning he understood the message that I was running late. The "B" would buy me another two hours without him worrying too much and without him having to pay the outrageous reverse phone charge. I started to be "Rooney C." to indicate up to a three hour delay to ease his mind, but I couldn't believe I might have that much bad luck.
How silly of me!
Trying to put thoughts of our troubles out of my mind, I drove on, listening to static-filled versions of my favorite rock songs when I was near sizable towns and to crackly country songs from one of the south's 50,000-watt clear-channel broadcasters the rest of the way. With only a weak AM radio in the old truck, I felt fortunate to have any music at all, even if many of the tunes weren't among my usual favorites. They at least helped mask the noise of the rain that started about 60 miles from home and the incessant sound of the wipers on the glass. With periods of heavy rain making it difficult to see in the darkness, traffic slowed to a crawl.
Thus, the rain delayed me further, only slacking off to become intermittent about twenty miles from home, making it about 11 PM when I neared Sturbin, my little home town. I'd loved our town when I was little, but things started to change when I hit high school, or maybe it was just that I stopped seeing it through the naive, rose-colored glasses of youth. About 3,000 people lived in the area and called Sturbin home; they supported our school and our local sports teams, but the town itself no longer felt quite like home to me.
While my father and our farm were there, my mother and childhood dog were gone and drug dealers from the city, a little over an hour away, were trying to take over what was left. Despite Mrs. Reagan's campaign to say "No," Jonathon, my high school classmate and one of best friends, and several others from recent classes hadn't and had paid the price with their lives. There was no telling how many others had become hooked over the past few years. Alcohol, tobacco, and sex had always been ways of passing time among young adults in the area, and marijuana had been available for those who wanted it, but the coming of hard drugs had put a dark cloud over the town that I was afraid would be its end.
As I drove through town, I saw a number of businesses that had closed in recent years, with buildings abandoned and boarded up. Considering the Black Monday stock market crash of just weeks earlier, I hated to think what else might lay in store for the town and the country in the coming months if the downturn became a real recession...or worse.
A few doors down, I got a clue. A guy stood smoking a cigarette in the doorway under an awning. The glass in the door behind him was broken, and the rest of the storefront was boarded up with plywood. I suspected that the man was homeless and had broken in to get out of the rain.
He watched as I drove by and, by the way he was holding it, it wasn't much of a guess that his cigarette hadn't come in a pack from one of the local stores. The little police department in town only had one full-time and three part-time officers and, other than the chief, who'd once been a cop in the city, the officers weren't trained or equipped for much more than traffic control when school let out or football games were over, an occasional traffic stop (which was why I was diligently observing the speed limit), or maybe a domestic disturbance. The joke around Sturbin was that the part-time officers' "chief skill" was knowing how to wake up the police chief for assistance if anything significant happened when he was off duty.
Driving on by, I was disgusted that our town had fallen so far in recent years as to have drug dealers, people overdosing, and apparently homeless drug users. I wondered why the police or the sheriff's department didn't put a stop to illegal drugs coming into our area.
After such a long, grueling trip, the final straw was the train crossing in the middle of town. The railroad usually switched cars on the nightly westbound train around 11 PM, and I had the bad fortune to arrive at the crossing at 11:04. That left me sitting there in the turn lane staring at the signal, one of only three in town, running through its paces and the main drag of the train sitting on the track blocking my way home. I could drive a few miles down and take the backroads, but that would add another fifteen minutes over bad roads, and the train would be gone by then. I waited, grumbling to myself.
The locomotive cut out a string of cars for the plant, picked up the previous batch, and then reassembled the train's consist. The on-and-off rain of the past little while resumed and I saw lightning strikes somewhere to the north and west. Watching all of this, I started thinking of explosion-filled action movies of the day and dreamed up creative new methods of putting locomotives out of commission that would have made Old West train robbers like Jesse James and Butch Cassidy envious.
Twelve minutes later, the track cleared and, almost six and half hours into the usual four hour trip home, I could practically see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. I was less than three miles from home for the long and much-needed week of Thanksgiving break and I became happier by the second as I left the gloom and doom of Sturbin behind me. As I did, I saw another big lightning strike in the distance, the boom of thunder arriving seconds later.
